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10 Dehydrating Tips By Roberta Cobb
Most of these tips assume you have one of the common retail food
dehydrators.
Buy a small appliance timer, and plug the dehydrator into it. Set
the "On" time to noon or midnight, and you can easily set the "Off" time
to however many hours you want the dehydrator to run. This way you
don't have to watch the dehydrator, and it will be less likely that
you'll have over-dried food.
Measure your meal servings when food is wet. Spread just one
serving per tray, and packing up will be easy.
Use the least solid liners you can for dehydrating. Use just the
shelf if the food won't fall through, use a screen sheet if the bits are
very small, and use a solid sheet only if the food is runny or soupy
(or cheesy, see below).
Don't dehydrate cheesy foods on the screen sheets, even if it seems
solid enough. The cheese (melts) oozes through the screens and won't
come off.
With heavy wet foods such as lasagna or split pea soup, it's best
to flip the food over halfway through the drying cycle. Have an extra
solid sheet available. Put the clean solid sheet on top of the one full
of food, then flip the two over, and peel the old solid sheet off the
food. Now use this solid sheet as the top for the next shelf.
Out of solid sheets? It's messy, but you can use clear plastic
food wrap. Stretch a couple of pieces over the tray, and overlap them.
Spread the wrap directly over the center hole and edges. Add your food,
which will pull the wrap down and into place, making a bit of an edge.
Now carefully cut an X in the center hole and stretch the wrap around
the hole so the wrap is on the sides of the center hole and the hole is
clear. Then carefully cut all the airflow holes around the outside
circumference of the tray.
You can always remove dried foods part way through, but never add
to what's in the dehydrator.
Rotating the trays from top to bottom can help dry food evenly.
The top tray seems to dry the slowest, and the bottom tray the fastest,
so simply move the top tray to the bottom and all the other trays shift
up by one.
Don't be a slave to the dehydrator. If you can't be nearby to
watch things, it's OK. The dry food will be OK for a few hours until
you get home to attend to it.
Once every few years it's a good idea to take the dehydrator apart
and clean out the little bits of dried food in the base. Just be
careful and attentive to what screw goes where, and be sure to do this
with the unit UNPLUGGED.